Camp creation (or rather failure to do so)

[Rose]

So, I’ve decided to make my own camp for my own faction. I’ve recruited an NPC ant told her to make a camp at a location that I liked.
But nobody told me that things are going to get this awful…

So here we are, standing both like dummies in the middle of the field, with 4 shelter kits, unable to make a tent. One of us is running around in panic trying to find other NPCs (which is hard, despite 2.50 NPC spawn density) and the other one is going to die from hunger and thirst unable to move away.

How is that even possible? Why do we have to have a third person to just set up a goddamn tent?

[mlangsdorf]

The tutorial does say you need two companions, but it could clearer. I should have Create Overseer fail if you don’t have two allies. No, wait, I have a better solution.

Anyway, talk to the Overseer and abandon the camp to recover the NPC.

[mlangsdorf]

In the future, you’ll get a warning when attempting to set up a faction camp with less than 2 NPCs, and you won’t see the dialogue option anyway.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

By the way, the reason you need 2 NPCs is that after you send 1 NPC off to do something, you need someone else to talk to in order recover that NPC. There are stupid reasons for that. I plan to fix those real soon now.

[Rose]

Yeah, I do understand that coding things can be a pain.
I’m not really familiar with coding, but the camp mechanics seem to be a new feature written over an old code with a lot of ‘crutches’ and stuff.
I’ve already debugged a new NPC in, but now the problem is that I’d better have him as an overseer, since he’s weaker.
Another thing is how awkward the camp as a whole is. I don’t even understand if the poor guys eat something or not, and if the calories distribution does giv a hint that they won’t die from hunger, there still is a problem with drinking. I can’t understand if they even need to drink things. And then why can’t I just leave my companion to live in the camp doing things? And how do they get food for themselves? And so on… There really are lots of questions and blind spots…

[mlangsdorf]

So I didn’t write faction camps. Acidia did, and my hat is off to him, but things need to get fixed.

If you’re playing the latest experimental, you can abandon a camp and immediately select another NPC to become overseer and re-establish the camp. So go ahead and swap those NPCs out.

If you don’t have NPC Needs Disabled, you’ll still need to provide food and water for your NPCs on top of the food you’re paying them for service. They’ll also get super tired while working. I am coding up a patch to fix that.

I’m also going to add an option to send NPC allies to forage for food for themselves.

It’s super easy to rewrite the tutorial now, so if there’s more stuff you want explained, please ask. Though do go through the tutorial first.

[Rose]

So I didn’t write faction camps. Acidia did

Yeah, I’ve scanned through that thread. Quickly, but I’ve noticed the one month deadline.

If you’re playing the latest experimental, you can abandon a camp and immediately select another NPC to become overseer and re-establish the camp. So go ahead and swap those NPCs out.

I dunno, I’ve tried abandoning the camp when there was nothing build yet, and the location stayed as a ‘camp survey’ without a possibility to create a new camp. I have 8044 at the moment.

If you don’t have NPC Needs Disabled, you’ll still need to provide food and water for your NPCs on top of the food you’re paying them for service.

Yeah, I’ve noticed my companion returning with hunger and thirst penalties after logging some trees. That was 28 hours. Now he’s upgrading a camp for 8 days… Is he going to return and immideatly die from thirst?
And does the overseer eat? I’ve never seen him eating in the tent, but while standing in the field waiting for the 3rd guy, he was actually devouring some meats I’ve given him beforehand.

I’m also going to add an option to send NPC allies to forage for food for themselves.

I mean, what’s going to happen to my camp if I don’t have any food to pay them? Will the overseer die? Can there be more people actually living in the camp than a single overseer?

It’s super easy to rewrite the tutorial now, so if there’s more stuff you want explained, please ask. Though do go through the tutorial first.

I really don’t even know where it is, all I’ve seen is the short text you get after choosing the ‘I want you to set up a camp here’ option in the dialogue.

[Rose]

So apparently this dude has just spent eight days building this mud house. Excellent.

[Rose]

Okay, so now I’ve been told that after upgrading a camp once more I’ll be able to send guys to find more guys (recruit new survivors). But I can’t find a proper option. How can I do it?

Okay, so my camp has 6 beds right now. What for? I can’t even assign an NPC to reside in the camp, not just dash from being my follower to doing part-time jobs in the camp.
There are three tents and a single NPC manager who is doing NOTHING.

[mlangsdorf]

In order:

• Yes, NPCs return super hungry and thirsty. I have a fix for that, but it depends on cleaning up the code some first and the code is a mess.
• The overseer is in guard mode and doesn’t eat.
• If you’re running the latest experimentals, you can talk to any NPC and choose the “let’s talk about faction camps”, which always has the option to go though the tutorial again.
• The overseer lies to you when he tells you can recruit companions. That option doesn’t come available until camp level 11, after you’ve finished putting doors in the central building. I don’t know why he lies like that. It would relatively trivial for me to fix, but it has to wait until the cleanup code gets reviewed and merged.

[Eastwardrope91]

Just something I’ve observed on base camps and NPCs in general. If a NPC isn’t in your following group they don’t need food water or rest(same with guards). Base camps are a tricky to set up due to material cost as NPCs that are gathering don’t actually get the materials you need for upgrades early on nor do they help until a bit later (think level 2 or so) so you need to do A LOT of work to get it going. Also if you have a base set up and the manager dies somehow you loss the camp and all your work.

[Rose]

Wait a second, so that means that only green NPCs need food? Like all those guys at the refugee center have no needs?

[mlangsdorf]

That used to be true, but as to two days ago, but as of release 8055 or so, you can recover a camp by standing in it and talking to a friendly NPC.

[mlangsdorf]

Yeah, NPCs who aren’t your friends don’t need to eat, drink, or sleep. Mostly because the NPC AI code is really, really primitive and unallied NPCs would die of starvation if they weren’t immune to it.

[Eastwardrope91]

All the materials can be recovered now? If so it makes it alot easier to build and keep it(don’t have the guard/leave guards for the manager.

[mlangsdorf]

Very little of the structure of the camp is actually tied to the camp manager NPC - he stores the sort points, but everything else is recreated on the fly from the fact that you’re talking to a camp manager NPC while standing in a faction camp overmap tile or is stored with the individual NPCs on missions. So the game doesn’t really care which camp manager NPC you’re talking, as long as you’re talking to one.

So if a camp manager NPC dies or gets relieved, you can replace him with another NPC. And any NPC performing away missions can be returned to camp, because the necessary sort conditions (talking to a camp manager while standing on a faction camp at the same location as the other camp manager’s faction camp) are still true.

But I’m not sure what you mean by materials. The camp doesn’t track materials, aside from food supply, which is managed by your faction which is a different thing in the code. Any items at the camp are just items on the ground in the vicinity of the camp, and when you send someone off to build something, the materials are consumed immediately.

[Eastwardrope91]

I was talking about construction materials. You used to loose them when the manager died as it was as good as abandoning it.

[Rose]

The launcher can’t “find remote builds”. Is the problem on my side?

[mlangsdorf]

The launcher is messed up right now because of a security change as I understand it.

[mlangsdorf]

There are no construction materials. There’s some stuff scattered on the ground in front of the manager’s tent, some of which gets consumed when you send a companion off to do something. That stuff is gone as soon as you send the companion off and there’s no way to recover it.

Admittedly, you didn’t used to be able to recover companions who were off-map doing stuff, even if “off-map” meant over there, planting seeds. So it used to be the camp manager died, you lost the companion and you would never see the results of what resources that companion consumed. But that’s been fixed.

[Entity]

I was having this issue last night, I downloaded the latest launcher and it was fine again.